Fantastic post, thanks for writing that all up!

This is a great reminder that even large or complex problems can be solved if you break them down and analyze them methodically. Rather than saying “we’re doomed, everyone abandon ship!”, you can stop and think for a moment.

We should always be willing to ask ourselves how much we want a problem to be solved, because it’s entirely possible that there is a reachable solution to that problem and it could be in our best interest to address it rather than putting it off.

So you think nothing should be done?

(Because that’s the usual sentence for genocide)

Or we could just not make a big deal about someone’s body…

I’m gonna be honest, I think you’re on the wrong side of this.

Also, you could just focus on the 2 fucking private jets. Or on all the mistreat of Americans and ignoring their constitutional rights. Or being unethical and inhumane towards human beings in general. I think those are in fact the bigger problems here.

The manual review though does improve your odds than an algorithm looking for keywords.

I mean… It’s a human looking for keywords…

Not to mention sometimes you got feedback of what your odds were of getting hired. If you gave someone your physical resumé, and they just laid it down in a random spot and we’re dismissive, you at least knew immediately that you should probably not expect a call back.

Ok, I guess you could just drop off your resume in person, but then what would happen is you give it to the person at the counter/reception desk/front office/whatever, and then you’d have no idea if it ever even get to a hiring manager. More often you’d just email your resume to the manager/HR (yes we had email in the 90s), so you’d know it would get to the right people, but then would have no idea if anyone actually ever looked at it unless you got a call back.

I mean, yeah. True. But to push back a little, driving at the actual speed of traffic is often safer than driving the official speed limit.

The real world and written law don’t always line up, the speed limit is one of those areas.

Job applications for one thing. When we were young, recruiters had to physically read the letters and/or places hiring had to physically see you in person.

Now hiring agencies just use automated tools (even before AI) and you get ghosted constantly.

Yeah, job applications haven’t changed that much.

It was still a dismissive black box, it’s just that the process was more manual. Instead of AI tools throwing your application away, someone skimmed it looking for a particular bullet point, if they don’t find it in 10 seconds your resume is tossed in the bin. Whether it was AI or a manager, either way you’re probably not getting a call back to let you know they tossed your application.

Comparing to book burnings is only a false equivalence, as you’re not destroying information, you’re destroying locks that require special keys, unlike FOSS.

I’m totally with you on this. It’s not book burning because this generation doesn’t own anything to burn in the first place. You don’t buy a movie, you “buy” a license to stream that movie for a period of time. Tragic.

I think a lot of us empathize with the protesters. I don’t actually see any posts saying “this is dumb”.

I am still confused though. I mean I understand protesting Trump, ICE, and the government in general. I can’t control that, so protest is one of my only courses of action. But with technology… we can just not use it. I think I haven’t used Facebook in over 15 years, I’ve never used Twitter. And I’m happier for it, they’re right, that works. I use a smartphone, but I limit the kind of apps I want to put on it. If I find that something, a phone, app, website, whatever, is impacting my life, keeping me from dealing with daily responsibilities, I know it’s a problem, so I’ll stop using it. My point is, I do have control over my tech use, so why rally about it? After all, all the protests in the world won’t give you better self control, that’s a skill you need to build.

Fuck yes. Especially printers.

But my IT guy advice on the matter is this: ink jet is a scam, don’t buy one, ever; don’t accept one for free. If you print a lot, get a laser printer for home, if you only print a few times a year, get a laser printer for home.

Unintentional sick burn on Saturn.

Hah, if satellites were actually that large… It still wouldn’t actually be a problem. It’s really hard to grasp just how far things are apart up in geostationary orbit, there is a truly immense amount is space. There’s plenty of elbow room for thousands of Rhode Islands floating around up there, no reason to worry about collisions.

That was a good read. I did think it was interesting that he decided to solve the randomized alphabet problem with the complex character recognition and image matching system he used. I mean, that was very clever and it clearly worked, so great! But an alternate option would have been the cryptographic method. There’s a lot of software designed to crack replacement cyphers (especially in English) it probably would have been trivial to drop those characters into one of these and have it spit out the results.

Admittedly it would likely struggle with the other three alphabets, the italic, heading and italic heading alphabets, where there may not be enough words to be certain about success.

I mean, some parts of the protocols we use for the Internet need to be in the clear to work, DNS comes to mind. If you want that kept private as well you need to use something like tor.

But regardless, what people generally actually care about keeping secret is the content, not the protocol.

It would be amazing if there were a more open source option.

It’s unfortunate that cars are so big and complex to manufacture. With a just as complex a set of regulatory systems around verifying their safety and roadworthiness. I really don’t see something more open source being a realistic expectation at any foreseeable point going forward.

We need to publish home addresses, make them scared.

Here here! I second that!

Also, my favorite line in that clip “Well, this oughta be different…”

In death… a spider has a name.

Yeah, I mean Gordon Freeman went there…

If home improvement and DIY were actual categories for the Nobel Prize, i’d be running out of places to put all my Nobel prizes.

I’d probably have to put in a new shelf. Maybe use some nice cherry planks…

Well that’s all true, we don’t actually know what the real filters are, are we already past them, or are they still ahead of us? Certainly people have speculated about this for a long time, and I won’t pretend to have any more real answers than anyone else. But honestly, I’d have a hard time believing that the really rare event, that the great filter lays somewhere between the development of the brain and the development of the kind of intelligence humans have. It just seems like a relatively small jump (relative to all the other hurdles) between many of the smarter animals on earth and human beings. For example, many species use tools a whole lot actually. Only a few other species actually make tools or alter them to a large degree, but you know, give it 10 million years and see if that changes. Likewise, many species have languages, some species even give themselves names, so they can intentionally address other individuals in their social group.

If you don’t mind a bit of total speculation on my part, in my opinion, the explanation to the Fermi paradox is actually pretty simple, there really is no paradox. Intelligent life is probably relatively common in the universe, the reason we don’t see aliens all over the place is that intelligent life thrives too well for that. Once a species is capable of traveling other stars, it’s just a matter of time before they settle most of their galaxy, like within a million years (which is very quick on evolutionary scales). We’re just the first intelligent life in this galaxy, we can assume this because if there were others, they’d already have colonies right here on earth, because it’s a great planet.

To double back on the great filter though, my best guess about which events might be truly rare, my money is on Eukaryotic life and mitochondria. That feels like a real freak accident, as well as an absolutely vital requirement for complex life.

Well, I’m not sure you’ve considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it’s done, I don’t think there’s any undoing it. There aren’t many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I’m confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.

Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that’s all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I’d estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10–200 million years, over and over again.

On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.